I track people who are disrupting the world of mobile technology. Non-conformists, innovators and agitators are this blog's unsung heroes, from entrepreneurs to scientists, to rebellious hackers. I'm the author of "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency", (Little Brown, 2012) which The New York Times called a "lively, startling book that reads as 'The Social Network' for group hackers." I recently relocated to Forbes' San Francisco office, and was previously Forbes' London bureau chief from 2008-12, interviewing British billionaires like Philip Green and controversial figures like Mohammed Al Fayed; I wrote last year's billionaires cover story on Russia's Yuri Milner, and have broken stories like the Facebook-Spotify partnership in 2011. Before all this I had stints at the BBC and as a radio journalist. You can watch me on 'The Daily Show' here. If you have a story idea or tip, e-mail me at polson@forbes.com or follow me on Twitter: parmy.

Scale, Not Privacy, Cited As Key 'Hurdle' For Mobile Advertisers

Large brands like Taco Bell want to reach large swathes of potential customers, as they traditionally have via television ads. (Photo credit: mikebaird)

Recent cyber security breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus and Snapchat don’t seem to have made mobile advertisers too worried about the future safety of customer data. Digital ad agencies who convened for the Mobile Media Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday said their clients — large brands like the ones mentioned above — were “pumped up” about hyper-location targeting with tools like Apple’s iBeacon, which could grant them access to the geolocation data of large swathes of potential customers.

During a panel on location marketing on mobile, representatives from several digital ad agencies were asked about “the biggest hurdles” they faced in promoting location-tracking tools to brands, and whether privacy and customer security featured at all.

In fact, neither were cited as a concern. Agencies pointed to the drive for bigger audiences, and the problems of getting technology startups to explain how their tracking tools worked to advertisers.

“For us [the hurdle] is to drive scaled results,” said Eric Perko, a media director at DigitasLBi who recently created branded playlists for Taco Bell on music-streaming service Songza. “They want to know if you invest heavily, can it drive sales as well as TV can. TV is still powerful, but so is understanding that you can drive people into stores in significant numbers.”

Advertisers will spend $18 billion on mobile ads in 2014 according to research out on Tuesday from Gartner. That’s a jump from $13.1 billion last year and thanks in part to a boost from new “targeting technology.”

With a motley array of tracking tools available to advertisers, it also seems to have been left to the third-party ad agencies working in the background to make sure their clients are following privacy regulations.

“Clients get excited about access to this new data,” said Sarah Bachman, director of mobile strategy at Horizon Media, adding: “They rely on us to be aware of privacy and compliance issues.”